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"Between quiet, thrifty, substantial farmers, and drinking bar-room loungers, are many degrees of comparison." "Excuse me, sir!" Simon Slade elevated his person. "The men who visit my bar-room, as a general thing, are quite as respectable, moral, and substantial as any who came to the mill and I believe more so. The first people in the place, sir, are to be found here.
There were several young women, and one of them a very tall, very fair girl, with large eyes as blue as forget-me-nots, and with a lovely, limp, and long blue frock of the same shade had been one of the beauties of the past season. She was a Lady Agatha Slade, and Emily began to admire her at once. She felt her to be a sort of added boon bestowed by kind Fate upon herself.
"There's the beach, as Slade described it," said Captain Parkinson, as they came abreast of the little reach of sand. "And what are those two bird-roosts on it?" asked Trendon. "See 'em? Dead against that patch of shore-weed." "Bits of wreckage fixed in the sand." "Don't think so, sir. Too well matched." "We have no time to settle the matter now," said the captain impatiently.
Slade, recognizing his master, even as President Supple on more than one occasion had been forced in terrible personal interviews to recognize him, said no word; but in the secret-service man's eyes a brutal gleam flashed its message of hate and loathing. Foul as Slade was, he balked at times, in face of this man's cruel and naked savagery.
As he stared he saw a weazened figure under an enormous, broad-brimmed hat, and, although he could not discern the face at the distance, he knew that it was Slade, come with a new and perhaps larger body of riflemen to burn away the extreme left flank of the Union force.
Practice assisted in proficiency, but a Wild Bill or a Slade or a Billy the Kid was born and not made. Quickness in nerve action is usually backed with good digestion, and hard life in the open is good medicine for the latter. This, however, does not wholly cover the case. A slow man also might be a brave man.
But such honors were only for those who were fortunate enough to have had a leg or an arm shot off or to have been paralyzed. For the hero who had had his nerves all shot to pieces there were no such spontaneous tributes. And that was the way it had always been with Tom Slade. He had always made good, but somehow, the applause and the grateful tributes had gone to others.
There was a wide difference between this and the truth. As a matter of fact, there were many worse desperadoes on the border. Slade was born at Carlisle, Illinois, and served in the Mexican War in 1848. He appears to have gone into the Overland service in 1859.
"A lot of little clews are better than one big one," Tom said as they scrambled up into the dense thicket. "The initials on the turtle, the new jack-knife, the willow shavings, all fit together." "Yes, but it takes Tom Slade to fit them together," Hervey said. "Maybe we might be mistaken after all," Tom answered. "Anyway, nobody'll have the laugh on us. We didn't talk to reporters."
"That's what they'll have to satisfy a judge and jury about! I think they'll find it difficult. But that's about all. Except this that they were all three about to clear out when the enterprising Miss Slade turned up and told Schmall she'd got the Nastirsevitch jewels. That was a stiff proposition for them. But they were equal to it.
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